I'm sorry for not having the exact math down in my brainstorm post - that's what i'm trying to clarify.

Patches that don't have a delay on application, but a delay on infusion.

Whether that's all at once or in chunks, I disagree that it needs to be done in units-per-second or anything even approaching cigarette application. In essence, something to nerf their usefullness as an instant all-better-bandaid mid combat, but not make them overtly obviously good/bad when applied by others, and not make beakers instantly better than patches.

I think there's definitely a timescale on which the slower application lends itself to Idea 1, but not to Idea 2. A combat situation lasts more than a couple dozen seconds usually. If all your chems are in the bloodstream before you actually end up in dire straits, you're not benefiting from pre-applying. At the same time, that dozen seconds or so is long enough for your opponent to permastun you and later finish you off.

In other words, it requires a little foresight, application when you're maybe in yellow or orange, which is when both of you're still moving fast enough that fighting back is definitely the thing you want to be doing, not healing- but since you can slap a patch on and keep fighting while you wait for the countdown, you're at least not a sitting duck.

a) remove all delays on all patches
b) make patches very slowly infuse their chems, requiring 30+ seconds of skin contact to dump it all
c) make patches removable by self-clicking with grab / disarm, with open hand, removing the last placed patch (stack, not queue)
d) give a red "this patch feels weird" for custom patches with reagents other than whitelisted "good" chems.

this accomplishes most of the wants in this thread without most of the broken rebalancing.
> patches become less broken, while medical docs retain the most effective means of healing (yknow, the rest of medbay, including cryotubes!!!!)
> deathpatches become less obvious, and while still distinct from "pristine" med patches, indistinguishable from "okay" med patches.
> realism

The point of the change I suggested was to lessen the general crew's ability to easily heal themselves, not specifically to nerf patches. Medical patches are everywhere, and are very quick to apply for the sheer amount of damage they heal all at once, which means that everyone has access to that amount of healing at that rate. The idea is to make doctors significantly better at doing their job than everyone else and to make healing yourself with the most readily available way to heal the most common damage types in a fight at least somewhat of a risk. If you have a medkit on your person you can totally heal 80 burn/brute instantly mid-fight assuming you aren't currently stunned.

Even with the nerf you propose, cryotubes would still go unused. Doctors are more than capable of making a cryotube in a pill and patches still have the convenience factor of being able to be carried around. As for "the rest of medbay", there isn't really much for healing brute or burn. There's saline-glucose and salicylic acid, but both of those chems are very slow to heal, to the point that people would still just use patches as they do now.

Balancing chemistry as a whole is a really huge undertaking, the idea that I'm trying to get at is trying to balance the usefulness of highly common medical equipment in such a way to not deter or make doctors less capable of healing people in any way, because I feel that either doctors need to be inherently better at healing people or medical supplies needs to be less readily available on every single map.

Aight, at the risk of shoving my entire ass up my foot again, - another what-if that tries to adress this in a comprehensive non-timer way.

I think you hit on something important in your last post : availability and chem balancing.
specifically I don`t think its the presence of patches that are the issue (as they're more or less pills that you can slap on people instantly if they whitelist, and will always be replaceable by pills or beakers)
It's what's in them.
We need to differentiate between topical light healing and orally / intravenously administered deep healing.

In other words, nerf Styptic and Sulfadiazine.:

a) Keep them as the default patch, but make them stop doing anything past maybe orange? enough to close up the surface and get you out of crit, but not healed.
Not a huge rebalance, just moving it from literally-best-in-all-scenarios to something closer to reality, a field-use emergency patch-up to get you from the hole in the station to medbay in almost one piece.

b) Introduce medbay-locked alternatives that act like the old topical chems, or make new ones that are injectable or otherwise take longer to apply / work via other medbay means. Leaving this vague because it's kinda beside the point. Let doctors hold the keys to the only "easy" way to get back to green.

Delays make gameplay feel heavy and trudgy, so does the slowdown of being in crit / red, and with patches and minipatches being the ubiquitous everywhere healer, they oughta be an emergency measure rather than an instant respawn.

(01-14-2019, 04:27 PM)Frank_Stein Wrote: Honestly, I like the idea of just making styptic and sulf less effective. Make people go to medbay to get fully healed in sleepers or the cryotubes

I think the problem isn't in the medicine, but the fact that there's so little wiggle room for injury. Anything above crit is an inconvenience, anything below crit is a dire emergency. I mean, shallow crit is great, you're jacked up to frick and need help, but it advances so quickly that you'd better already be in medbay if you want to use anything other than patches and epi.

Seriously, most of the time you're just better off cloning someone that'd take more than a few patches to fix.

(01-14-2019, 04:27 PM)Frank_Stein Wrote: Honestly, I like the idea of just making styptic and sulf less effective. Make people go to medbay to get fully healed in sleepers or the cryotubes

I think the problem isn't in the medicine, but the fact that there's so little wiggle room for injury. Anything above crit is an inconvenience, anything below crit is a dire emergency. I mean, shallow crit is great, you're jacked up to frick and need help, but it advances so quickly that you'd better already be in medbay if you want to use anything other than patches and epi.

Seriously, most of the time you're just better off cloning someone that'd take more than a few patches to fix.

This is outside the scope of this thread, but one idea I had once in regards to health and damage was along the lines of making people generally beefier and able to take more damage overall, but as their health drops down they roll for semi-random trauma statues to be applied to them. These would only be removable by medical treatment provided by a doctor, even if you heal back from them.

(01-15-2019, 07:49 AM)Prichard Wrote: What if styp/sulf patches didnt work if there is already styp/sulf in your blood. Specifically to nullify patch spam

Hey hey hey!
This right here!
functionally works as a cooldown effect instead of a delay, that's nice
also punishes people with Slow Metabolism who tend to have better chances of being stimmed-up before a fight!
+1

(01-15-2019, 07:49 AM)Prichard Wrote: What if styp/sulf patches didnt work if there is already styp/sulf in your blood. Specifically to nullify patch spam

I feel like that would be unintuitive and lead to a lot of doctors spamming patches on people and then being confused as to why it's not working, and would only kind of nerf styptic in a combat-situation as you still get 40 points of burn and brute if you don't have styptic or silver in your bloodstream, and out of combat it wouldn't really matter because styptic and silver would still be the way people healed.

I also don't think delays are that clunky or out of place. Lots of things that you shouldn't be able to do instantly have delays currently, such as stripping people and forcing people to take pills. The core idea is to make healing specifically in combat or when rapidly taking damage (ie: on fire) less effective than it is now while also making doctors exactly as capable of healing others as they are now. I also don't want doctors to be a necessary way to heal yourself fully, as there often isn't a doctor on lowpop. I just think that doctors should be significantly more helpful at healing you, not essential.

For the intuitive part. Prevent the patch from being applied. Add a message saying that “there is already a patch on this person” and have the patch fall off or something when they are done.

The point is patches become band-aids not full heals.

Reduce patch healing to 30 each maybe. In combat/holes to space patches can still be emergency medicine but they won’t keep you alive forever. Out of combat patches could be used as primary healing sure, as long as the person getting healed is hardly injured or feels like sitting there for 10 minutes.

I know I don’t have the patience for that. If I’m hurt more than one set of patches can fix, I’m definitely not going to wait around, ill hop in cryo or something